https://www.galoisrepresentations.com/2017/12/17/the-abc-conjecture-has-still-not-been-proved/ Persiflage=Frank Calegari氏シカゴ大 The ABC conjecture has (still) not been proved Posted on December 17, 2017 (抜粋) Terence Tao says: December 18, 2017 at 2:46 pm Thanks for this. I do not have the expertise to have an informed first-hand opinion on Mochizuki’s work, but on comparing this story with the work of Perelman and Yitang Zhang you mentioned that I am much more familiar with, one striking difference to me has been the presence of short “proof of concept” statements in the latter but not in the former, by which I mean ways in which the methods in the papers in question can be used relatively quickly to obtain new non-trivial results of interest (or even a new proof of an existing non-trivial result) in an existing field.
From what I have read and heard, I gather that currently, the shortest “proof of concept” of a non-trivial result in an existing (i.e. non-IUTT) field in Mochizuki’s work is the 300+ page argument needed to establish the abc conjecture. It seems to me that having a shorter proof of concept (e.g. <100 pages) would help dispel scepticism about the argument. It seems bizarre to me that there would be an entire self-contained theory whose only external application is to prove the abc conjecture after 300+ pages of set up, with no smaller fragment of this setup having any non-trivial external consequence whatsoever.